In Friday’s (11/15) New York Times, Allan Kozinn reports on the new edition of The Grove Dictionary of American Music. “When it was first published in 1986, the AmeriGrove, as its users call it, filled four volumes, with 2,632 pages, and cost $495.… A new edition, to be published by Oxford University Press on Dec. 2, doubles that: it will be in eight volumes, with 5,592 pages. Of the more than 9,300 articles, more than 4,800 are new.” In an interview on OUP’s website, Editor Charles Hiroshi Garrett—an associate professor of musicology at the University of Michigan and author of the 2008 book Struggling to Define a Nation: American Music and the Twentieth Century—“said that the new version would take an expanded view of certain American musical forms—country music, for example.… He also noted that ‘the editorial team took particular care to challenge the black-white binary that characterizes some scholarship on American music. Just as coverage of European-American and African-American topics was expanded in the dictionary, we sought to capture a wider spectrum of musical activity and to discuss musical practices often lost in the margins.’ That includes, he said, Latino, Asian-American, Native American, and Hawaiian music and musicians.”
Posted November 18, 2013
